A Modern Masterpiece Turns 25

Elizabeth McCracken once called it “the most beloved book of stories I know from the past 20 years among writers.” Now Denis Johnson’s “Jesus’ Son” — a mordant and tender, plain-spoken and poetic, sometimes hallucinogenic set of linked stories about addiction, failure and redemption — is 25 years old, and a few of its writer-fans recently convened at New York’s Symphony Space to sing again its praises.

Jenny Offill led the panel, joined by Michael Cunningham, Victor LaValle and Chuck Palahniuk. (The evening also featured readings of stories by the actors Chris Bauer and Billy Crudup, the latter of whom starred in the film adaptation of Johnson’s book.)

All the participants addressed the question of why, to quote Cunningham, “so many people want to write this book over again.” They landed on the idea that the collection’s effects are so potent but seamlessly achieved that they inspire authors to try the same magic trick. “All really good writing is mysterious, because it’s irreducible,” Offill said, but there was general agreement that “Jesus’ Son” is especially so. Cunningham said he wanted to start a seminar about the craft of writing — prominently featuring Johnson’s book — titled “Hell If I Know.”

LaValle emphasized the way that “Jesus’ Son” — which is often, on its surface, blunt and violent — is suffused with a questing, spiritual tone. He said the stories contained an idea that he misses in much of contemporary literature, which is that “a world beyond this world is something serious to contemplate.” Offill said: “He’s not afraid to risk going straight toward the sublime.”

Johnson crams all of his risks and rewards into less than 140 pages, making the book, as James McManus wrote in the Book Review in 1992, a “masterpiece of compression and moral entropy.”

Quotable

“People don’t become writers because they love having spontaneous real-world interactions with living people as bodies with clothes in time. Email was very appealing to me. I thought of the self as something that is best expressed through careful crafting.” — Elif Batuman, author of “The Idiot,” in an interview with Vogue

Arthur Miller on the Justice System

In 2002, the playwright Arthur Miller wrote a brief essay to help the Center on Wrongful Convictions at Northwestern’s law school in its campaign to abolish the death penalty in Illinois. In it, Miller described the case of Peter Reilly, a teenager who was convicted in 1974 of brutally killing his mother. Miller wrote of the convolutions that led to Reilly’s eventual exoneration: “The life of the innocent cannot be allowed to depend on that much luck.” The letter is featured in a new anthology, “Anatomy of Innocence,” which features the testimony of several wrongfully convicted people — some of their stories written for the book by Lee Child, Sara Paretsky and other high-profile authors. Miller’s entire essay can be read here.